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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, a cautionary tale about how social media threatens democracy.
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Basu, Narrating: Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa wants the world to wake up and pay attention, specifically to the Philippines. Because what's happening there, she says, should serve as a warning to all other countries about the way authoritarian leaders can use social media to intentionally spread disinformation and undermine democracy.
Maria Ressa: I call it "insidious manipulation" all the time, but this is a corruption of our information ecosystem. And frankly, someone should be held accountable because impunity online is impunity offline.
Basu, Narrating: Maria has been a journalist in Asia for over three decades, working at "CNN," then the major Philippine media company "ABS-CBN." Then in 2012, she co-founded "Rappler," the top digital news site serving the Philippines. She's been arrested multiple times and she faces charges that could put her in prison for the rest of her life. She's out now with a new book called "How to Stand Up to a Dictator." In it, she lays out a few reasons why the Philippines has been ground zero for the kind of impact that social media can have on a democratic system. One reason is the Philippines has a super plugged-in population.
Ressa: When social media came, we were first adapters because while the United States was still like 35, 40% on mobile, the Philippines was 87%, 90% on mobile.
Basu, Narrating: And not just plugged-in generally, but very much on "Facebook."
Ressa: By the time we set up "Rappler," 97% of the Filipinos on the internet were on "Facebook." "Facebook" was our internet.
Basu, Narrating: It also has cheap labor, a government with a culture of corruption, and, for the last six years, an authoritarian political leader vying for more power. These things combined created the conditions for disinformation to spread widely. Ressa says, countries like the U.S. should take note of any similarities to the Philippines and learn how to course correct before it's too late.
But to understand the whole picture, you need to know just how optimistic Maria initially was about the promise of social media and what it could mean for civic engagement. That's the whole reason why she created "Rappler," a news organization that was heavy on citizen participation. She gave me an early example of why it felt like this was the key to the future of journalism. It was 2009, a massacre in the Philippines. Dozens of people who were part of a local election motorcade were gunned down. More than half of the victims were journalists.
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Ressa: The Committee to Protect Journalists calls it the largest election-related violence anywhere in the world. These people were going in a caravan with a candidate. He was gonna file his certificate of candidacy. They were stopped, shot and killed in broad daylight, and their bodies were buried in a mass grave using a city-owned backhoe. A citizen journalist sent us three messages to "ABS-CBN." And by the third message, he sent the photo. With that photo, we were able to see there was a white Toyota HiAce van, the body spread eagle on the ground. That to me was the tipping point for citizen journalists. He turned out to be a soldier because only soldiers were admitted into that area. All of the journalists had been kept out by the government and the police. They were in hotels. We had sent our reporters there, but no one could get there. It was the conscience of one soldier who didn't want to whitewash it. And that possibility that you could have … well, this is really what we have today. It's an individual battle for integrity, except that it didn't tip for good, it tipped for bad. Because of the business model that was chosen by the tech platforms.
Ressa: So, what we wanted to do in "Rappler" was impact. There were three pillars. And this is 2011. "Technology," and I always put it first because distribution is critical. "Journalism," that's the core. And then "Community" is the third part. So, my elevator pitch at that point was: we build communities of action and the food we feed our communities is journalism. And I wanted to help build institutions bottom up. I mean, I still haven't given up. I think it is still possible, which is why I don't think this horrendous time that we are living through where we have destroyed trust, destroyed facts, I think we can get out of it, but it will require journalists and tech to work together.
Basu: Actually, can you describe the way in which journalists and tech can work together? Maybe this is helpful for some people to hear, the difference between a person tweeting out a picture like that into the vacuum, into the Twitter-sphere, versus there being an infrastructure in place …
Ressa: To verify it.
Basu: To verify it.
Ressa: Before it hits the public sphere.
Basu: Right. What's the difference? What should people understand about that difference?
Ressa: The protection of the public sphere is the difference. When news organizations were the gatekeepers, when journalists were the gatekeepers, we were legally liable, and we had standards and ethics manuals, morally liable not to taint, not to corrupt the public sphere. We were protective of that. We knew why we were doing what we were doing. This is the mission of journalism. And that photo took us almost 24 hours to verify that it was real. And we didn't release it into the public sphere because what if it's not? Well, what happened when tech became the gatekeepers to the information ecosystem, they abdicated responsibility for facts. That's the critical. That is what has caused cascading failures.
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Basu, Narrating: Most of Maria's criticism in her book is about "Facebook." "Facebook" has responded to some of her criticism in the past saying it denies wrongdoing and supports press freedom. But she argues that "Facebook" bears a lot of responsibility for the political reality in the Philippines today.
Ressa: The tech companies will tell you that they only mirror what humanity is. That is not true. They create the worst of humanity.
Basu, Narrating: Maria, like a lot of other critics, says that "Facebook's" algorithms prioritize content that keeps you scrolling, even if that content is unverified, untrue, harmful, or even propaganda by foreign or domestic agents.
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Ressa: Facts don't spread as fast and as far as lies. So, what we have seen now, this is a 2018 MIT study that said that lies spread at least six times faster than those really boring facts.
Ressa: And then beyond that, why do they spread? Because it's a behavior. It became a behavior modification system because the end goal is to keep you on the platform. It's an attention economy. You scroll why? Because it's a lie that's incendiary. You're afraid. So fear, anger, hate, us against them.
Basu: Emotions. Strong emotions. You're saying content moderation is the wrong way of thinking about the problem.
Ressa: It's like your crazy neighbor who tells you about a conspiracy theory. He can keep saying that. You just don't make it the front-page headline in your community newspaper. But the way the social media platforms are built, are designed, is that crazy conspiracy theory will take over and go viral. And those facts that debunk it, they never spread. That's the fundamental flaw.
Basu, Narrating: Many social media companies profit off of learning all of your likes and dislikes, then selling your "consumer profile" to companies so they can target you for ads. Now, it's one thing for that data to get sold to a company that's trying to sell you a mattress. It's a whole other thing for it to be used by political players who want to manipulate facts for their own gain.
Ressa: If you don't have privacy, you cannot have democracy. If you have been turned into code, if your private thoughts are wide open and you are being insidiously manipulated, if you are Pavlov's dogs, how the heck can we have democracy? How do we choose our leaders? We don't control that.
Basu, Narrating: And Maria says, we're already seeing the impact of this around the world today.
Ressa: If you don't have integrity of facts, you can't have integrity of elections. And what we have seen is that 60% of the world today lives under autocracies. And we're rolling back the number of democracies to 1989 levels. We are electing illiberal leaders democratically because they get the widest spread.
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Basu, Narrating: Maria's perspective on this is so important because she saw this happen in the Philippines when Rodrigo Duterte became president in 2016. And she says, what happened there is a warning sign for all of us.
Duterte campaigned on a vigilante message — that criminals and drug dealers should be killed without trial. And he adopted the platform full force when he took office, pursuing what he called a "war on drugs." According to Human Rights Watch, during Duterte's term, more than 12,000 Filipinos were killed, mostly people in low-income neighborhoods. At least 2,500 of those deaths have been linked to the police.
Ressa: It was kind of like strongman ruler. That was what he promised, and that was what he gave. But it went hand in hand with an information operation on social media that transformed us.
Basu, Narrating: Now, at the time, Maria and her team didn't know about this information operation. They just saw tons of false information spreading online. Content that justified Duterte's "war on drugs" and villainized those who questioned it. So, they decided to investigate to try to understand where all of this was coming from.
"Rappler" ended up publishing a three-part investigative series bringing to light how Duterte's camp, and pro-Duterte groups, were weaponizing social media. As part of it, they looked at 26 suspicious-seeming "Facebook" accounts that all followed each other.
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Ressa: We put on an Excel sheet everything they said they were, and then we manually checked each one. They were fake. Everything. Where they lived, where they worked, where they went to school, everything was a lie. Their behavior was strange because they belonged to more groups than they had friends. Their friends were only the 26 of them. And then we did the other thing of counting how many could these 26 fake accounts touch? Nudge? And it took us three months to manually count them. But this sock puppet network of 26 fake accounts could influence up to three to 4 million others. Three to 4 million! And I was like, okay. And it took three months. But that was when we began to find ways to pull down the data. Because it is about the data, and it is about the impact of exponential lies.
Basu: Were they real people? Were they bots? Do you have a sense?
Ressa: So, what we saw was that they used automation as an alert. So, if Duterte's name was mentioned, you would within seconds get an automated response. But in general, they were real people or fake accounts. It was a combination of these things. And some of the policies of "Facebook" didn't address this. They took five years to get to the "coordinated authentic harm."
Basu: Coordinated authentic harm. Yeah, okay.
Ressa: It is when real people are either paid, co-opted, or convinced to … the policy is brigading. When they come and attack you because they want to silence you. America thinks about it, and largely because you have a tech lobby that's $70 million a year, but [CHUCKLES] you talk about it as a free speech issue. It isn't. Free speech is being used to stifle free speech. And inevitably, in the global south, it is journalists first.
Basu: I will say, there comes a couple of scenes in the book, but in this particular case, where you brought these findings, you brought the data to "Facebook." How did they respond at the time?
Ressa: I think they listened, and I have no doubt that - I talked to three people - I have no doubt they ran it up the flagpole. But it was so new you had to have been on the front lines to experience it. In 2017, I actually spoke to Mark Zuckerberg about this. And there's that famous clip of Mark saying, oh no, the disinformation? One percent. Well, he never told us what the universe of data he was looking at. So, I think they downplayed it because their profit motive overshadowed everything.
Basu, Narrating: "Facebook" has denied prioritizing profit over safety, saying it's invested heavily in keeping people safe online. But Maria's personal experience would suggest otherwise.
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Basu, Narrating: It didn't take long after "Rappler" published its investigative series for hateful messages to start pouring in.
Ressa: The methodology's the same whether you're talking about Stop the Steal or attacking a journalist or attacking a human rights activist anywhere around the world. In the Philippines in 2016 when Duterte was elected, we came out with this weaponization of the internet series. I was pounded with 90 hate messages per hour. In 2016, after that, the meta-narrative that was seeded about me, about "Rappler's" journalist equals criminal. A year of this. You know, you say a lie a million times on social media, it becomes a fact.
Basu, Narrating: This narrative that had been seeded on social media then started coming from figures high-up in government and from President Duterte himself.
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Basu, Narrating: In 2017, in his State of the Nation address, Duterte called out "Rappler" by name, falsely accusing the company of being foreign owned.
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Rodrigo Duterte: "ABS," "Rappler."
Duterte: [SPEAKING IN FILIPINO]
Duterte: Have you tried to pierce your identity and it will lead you to America? Do you know that? And yet the constitution requires you to be 100%, media, Filipino.
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Ressa: And then a week later, we got our first subpoena. And then after that, 14 investigations. By 2018, there was a shutdown order that we challenged head on. We got the shutdown order, and I was so incensed because I have been a news head for a long time, and I knew it was wrong. And so …
Basu: What were you being charged with?
Ressa: Oh my gosh, so many. [LAUGHS] Tax evasion, like six months after the government gave us a top corporate taxpayer award. This is devoid of anything, devoid of context, devoid of time and place. So, there are three buckets: Tax evasion; there were five charges at some point. And then the second bucket is cyber liable. The third bucket is securities fraud, which connected to foreign ownership. That's a familiar one that's used against journalists all around the world. So, when I was arrested, I was shocked because it was … and this is a case that I can't really talk that much about because in order to be here today, I have to ask for court permission.
Basu: To leave the Philippines.
Ressa: To leave the Philippines. And in this particular case, it is at the court of last resort, the Supreme Court. And there's a clause that is so broad that I'm not sure what I can say. But having said that, let me just say, in less than two years I had 10 arrest warrants. The Philippine government issued 10 arrest warrants against me. And it got to a point where within a six-week period, I was arrested twice. So, this is why I focus on the macro. Because in the end, this is not in my control. This is a tactic of intimidation, and I'm gonna keep doing my job.
Basu: Yes. But it's also real, and you're also a real person. And I can only imagine the emotional toll of constant legal challenges, online vitriol. What has it been like? What has it felt like these past few years for you?
Ressa: Part of this is, I think, that being a war zone/breaking news broadcaster is great training for this. [LAUGHS] If you ever wanna challenge a dictator. No. Because you walk into danger. You bring your team into danger, and there are things that happen, and your stomach kind of gets queasy, and you make judgment calls. This time it just lasted a long time. It's years in the making, and it is in my home. But, you know, at the beginning with the attacks, I was like, it's all new. And the first thing I did is what a good journalist does. I looked at my data again. Could we be wrong? No, we were not wrong. And we kept going. I was most protective of our team because I, at that point, was in my fifties, and I had a long track record behind me. But I had young reporters. "Rappler's" about a hundred people. The median age is 23 years old …
Basu: Oh, very young.
Ressa: … 63% women. None of this by design. Very young because the median age in the Philippines is 23 years old. So, when the attacks began online, I had enough experience to know that these types of attacks could turn into real-world violence. So, we increased security. And it's all about risk. Like how each person wants to handle the risks. Since we had a young group, I told our team we were gonna fight this, but that if you are afraid or you don't wanna handle this - because everyone has different levels of risk - and so I said, if you want to, please let us know, and if you want to leave, we will help place you somewhere else. Not one editorial member left. Not one. And I think what the Duterte years did to us, is it was like taking coal and putting so much pressure that you become a diamond. It was like the mission became overwhelming, and I was so proud of our reporters. I think that's the upside. Nietzsche's quote is right. I also quote in the book, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." So, we've come out stronger.
Basu: I have to say, seeing you … I'm so glad to be sitting across from you here in New York. We're in person together, which is wonderful.
Ressa: In these nice studios. [LAUGHS]
Basu: [LAUGHS] And I know that wherever you go, it's like this question follows you. Why are you going back to the Philippines? And I understand that home is home, but work is also work. And plenty of people do their work from exile. I know that you must be wrestling with this question all the time. I don't know if you're in a similar place as you've always been.
Ressa: Why do I keep going back? Because if I didn't, I'd be a criminal, number one. Number two, I'm not gonna be a monster to fight a monster. I believe in certain values, and I'm holding to those values. And the third part is, if I were to be convicted and jailed for being a journalist, that would fundamentally change the Philippines. It is not just about me. And the hard part is, I was handed the baton, I became a news head at a very strange moment in time. I am not gonna drop it. I am gonna hand it to the next generation because news, journalism, the mission of journalism has never been as important as it is today. I'm lucky. Journalists around the world are getting jailed or getting killed. I'm still here.
Basu: Yeah. But you do face jail, right? You face jail time for potentially the rest of your life, right?
Ressa: The rest of my life. Yeah. Uh … But it's a Damocles sword. And Damocles swords, the best way to deal with them is to flip 'em away because they're meant to prevent you from doing what you need to do. And that's kind of … I think that's the power of "Rappler." Our country will fundamentally change, I think. And I don't believe that our values have changed. I think information warfare, information operations has changed what people think. I think facts are debatable; that has never happened before. This is my 36th year as a journalist. And it is a global problem. So, we will find our way through this. And I wanna be part of the solution. Whether I go to jail will depend on what I do now.
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Basu, Narrating: Maria is surprisingly optimistic for someone who faces jail time. And she suggests that you should be, too. In fact, it's urgent that you see yourself as part of the solution. After all, rising authoritarian leaders in other countries affect everyone.
Ressa: So, once they're elected, they crumble the institutions of democracy in their own country, but they don't stay in their own country. They shift the geopolitical power balance. You have a thousand-page Mueller document that had data released by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee in December 2018. That data shows you the insidious manipulation of geopolitical power. Russia found a way to go to the molecules of democracy, the citizens directly.
Basu, Narrating: And her advice is, any self-respecting democracy needs to take action now.
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Ressa: Look, the solution to this, and I do short, medium and long term. In the long term, it is education. In the medium term, it's legislation because the democratic countries have abdicated responsibility as much as the tech companies. In the short term, think about this as hand-to-hand combat. It is an individual battle for integrity, individual battle for values.
Basu: What can people do? Not necessarily journalists. Just people.
Ressa: Okay. The two points. One is, if we just follow this corrupt model, it atomizes journalism, it atomizes meaning, it encourages the worst journalism to get the widest distribution. So, that gets in the way of purpose and meaning for every single human being on these platforms. That's one. The second thing is, we have to stop being users, passive users, and become citizens again. We have to reinvent what civic engagement means in the age of exponential lies. And what we did in the Philippines - and we know it succeeded, but it was only a three-month effort - what we did is we formed a whole-of-society approach to fight for facts.
Basu: This year. For this year's election, right, that happened in May?
Ressa: For this year's elections. Yes. And what we found … we did a four-layer pyramid connected by a data pipeline. Sixteen news organizations working together, doing fact checks. The goal was just every day you do a fact check. What we did is we shared each other's. So, we got rid of the competition among news groups when it comes to the battle for facts. And then we had a second layer, it's called "the mesh" where we ask civil society, NGOs, human rights organizations, business, the church, to share these fact checks, but add emotion. And when they did that, we found … the only emotion we asked them not to do was anger. [CHUCKLES] Because you don't wanna be a monster to fight a monster. Right?
Basu: But you did harness the existing infrastructures.
Ressa: Because it's the only thing we can do. You know what we did? We did an influencer marketing campaign for facts. Right? And what we discovered was that inspiration spreads as fast or as far as anger. The third layer is "academic research." It's these eight organizations that we gave them the data and every week they would have a webinar that would tell Filipinos who's being manipulated, what are the meta-narratives, and who's winning and who's losing. Layer four is "rule of law." It's the legal organizations in the Philippines who finally came in, and they filed at least 21 cases, tactical and structural litigation, to protect the three layers of the pyramid. And they, the lawyers, were so much more energized than those exhausted reporters at the bottom of the pyramid because they were just joining in the battle. This is not ours alone. If you look at it, the Norwegian Nobel committee gave the same signal in 2021. They gave the Nobel Prize to journalists. In 2022, they gave it to civil society.
Basu: Right, right.
Ressa: This is how we fight in this moment. But we shouldn't be alone. I think we're gonna look back a decade from now, and we will find that this moment will determine whether democracy survives. It's a tipping point. And how do we fight this? And that is where, if you are listening to this, look inside yourself. Don't shy away from news. That's something the Pew Global Attitude survey was saying, that you're avoiding the news. You wanna be an ostrich and bury your head in the sand. This is what dictators want you to do. This is what authoritarians want you to do. Because if you don't look and you don't care, they move forward faster. So, look, this is the moment that matters. I play basketball. Yes, I'm short, but I play basketball. And I keep saying it's the last two minutes, and we're not winning, but we could still win. So, you've got elections coming up in 2024! Get your facts-first pyramid moving! This is it!
Basu: Yeah. Don't stop playing, just cause the buzzer's coming.
Ressa: Yeah.
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Basu: Maria, thank you so much for your time. This is really an enjoyable conversation. I think you're one of our most important thinkers in this space. Truly.
Ressa: Thank you for having me.
Basu, Narrating: You can read Maria Ressa's book, out now, called "How to Stand Up to a Dictator" on Apple Books. You can find a link on our show notes page.
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